Posts at The Last Word on Nothing

It was a bird of confluences. Nameless, to us. Gray as cloud belly, large as raptor, with eyes streaked over black as if with a stick of charcoal.

The first time I saw it, I stood shin deep in the narrow, clear Pitman River, steps away from the line of opaque jade water marking its union with the Upper Stikine River. The Stikine flows through a landscape sawed at the margins by endless mountain ranges, and is one of three great salmon-bearing rivers that originate in a swath of northern British Columbia known as the Sacred Headwaters. My present purposes were neither great nor sacred, though: I had splashed into the water to pee, or rinse my face, or both, but not in that order, when the bird caught my attention.

It moved while remaining nearly motionless. Its body was fixed in a soaring cross, with narrow, scythe-like wings and a long bill, and it swung in slow arcs a dozen feet above my head, out over the main current, then back. A juvenile gull maybe, or some searching ocean bird thrown improbably far inland. If silence were a creature, it would be this one. More…

This satirical science post, part of a series of posts and making fun of the hyperbole of shark week, that ran on The Last Word on Nothing June 28, 2016.

Owls. Little downy Ewoks. Fat and fusiform with big round eyes, legs feathered like miniature pilot pants in a stiff wind, perhaps a pair of droopy tuft ears. What is more trustworthy than droopy tuft ears? They appear as if they will take your deepest secrets to the grave. Perhaps this is why owls decorate a wide variety of hipster girl paraphernalia.

But beware, because owl tufts are not really ears. And this is where the treachery begins. Instead, owl ears are clandestine, twisted caverns, buried out of sight on either side of the bird’s sinisterly rounded skull. Worse, one is high, and one, low – an asymmetry that allows owls to triangulate on the exact location of sounds. Sounds made by things they will snab with their razor sharp talons and eviscerate with weird, hooked little nose-job beaks. Things like…YOU. More…

This post originally appeared at The Last Word on Nothing June 10, 2016

I keep a wooden box on my bedside table.

It’s cheap – an old Yalumba Wine case that I found on a curb somewhere, with a hinged lid and a shred of price tag still attached. Usually, it’s stacked high with magazines half read, a thing seldom opened and often dusty. But in all of the houses where I’ve lived in two states, I’ve kept it within hands’ reach of where I sleep.

What it contains is difficult to describe.

Nominally, it’s a collection of maps. I found the first in 2007 at an Aspen, Colorado thrift store – a treasure of a place where you could pick up the castoffs of the rich with the scrapings from your pocket. Designer dresses crammed in the back of the 50-cent bin; $300 jackets for the price of a sandwich. Rifling through the shelves of the basement book room, my hands closed on a gallon ziplock so fat it couldn’t seal. Old topographical maps of the surrounding warren of peaks and redbanked creeks spilled from its mouth, along with several hand-drawn novelty maps of the same, and giant dog-eared Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management maps of deserts further west, all the way into Utah. More…

I was reminded of this fact not long ago when, biking back home across southeast Portland from the waterfront, a veritable river of crows began streaming overhead. Thousands of them blurred and bobbed and circled each other in a stuttering current from east to west. This current eddied over warehouses. Spilled over parking lots. Formed a recirculation hole over the freeway, then fanned into a delta and out of sight beyond the skyscrapers of downtown. Corvid biologist John Marzluff later told me that the crows were likely heading for a communal roost to settle for the night. There’s one in his home city of Seattle that’s 15,000 strong.

Yet while crows and ravens get most of the attention, smaller members of the corvid family like jays and nutcrackers are out in the world busily building and rebuilding forests. Not on purpose, of course, but through a behavior charmingly called “scatter hoarding,” which basically involves stashing seeds around in various places for later devourment. (The same phrase could easily describe the way I distribute books throughout my house.) More…

There’s a certain category of mundane but distinctly unpleasant discovery: The blueberries you just mixed in your oatmeal explode mold into your mouth at 6 a.m. You read that Donald Trump won the Nevada Republican caucuses. You roll over in bed to find a tick lodged midriff-deep in your shoulder, wiggling about with a tenacity that suggests she plans to spelunk all the way through to your lungs.

“Fortuitously, the antibiotic you take prophylactically for Lyme disease is also the one you take to treat Chlamydia,” the doctor tells me cheerfully a day later when he checks the bruised and swollen bite and gives me a prescription. I stare at him, wondering why he thinks I need this information. It’s unlikely that I’ve got Lyme. Though local incidence is going up, Oregon saw only 44 reported cases in 2014 and Washington generally gets fewer than 30 a year – with just zero to three stemming from local ticks. But the fact that odds are in my favor fails to cheer me as I pluck tick after ever-more-engorged tick from my dog over the next several days. They’re small and hide well in her fur, so unless they pop out of her ears and stroll calmly across her face (some do) I can’t seem to find them until they’re attached and on their way to becoming fat and shiny as coffee beans.

Their emergence is, of course, just as much a sign of spring as the lovely purple grass widows my friend Roger and I had been out looking for when tickmageddon started last Saturday. By tick 10, I started to wonder: Aside from their reputation for transmitting more diseases than any other blood-sucking arthropod, why shouldn’t I find a way to appreciate ticks, too – from a safe distance away? Maybe I could even learn to love them a little bit. Continue reading The day I tried to love ticks

Behold, the majestic white cliffs. They form ghostly canyons that stretch into forbidding fog. Swallows build mud-daub nests on their walls. Falcons dive from their precipices to eat the swallows. Some say people have vanished here without trace, back during the first days of exploration.

Limestone? you ask. The incised and sculpted leavings of an ancient seabed?

When I put on the metallic silver unitard and homemade alien mask that rainy morning, I had no idea that I was about to embark on one of the most stressful weekends of my life.

How could I? I love wearing costumes. One Halloween, I dressed as a vulture-like Skeksis from Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal, and stalked through the local grocery sniffing packages of meat. Another, I made 30 little men out of fabric and baling wire, gluegunned toothpick spears into their tiny mitts, and sewed them all over my clothes. When my friends asked what I was, I screamed that I was “being attacked by tiny people!”

A mask gives you freedom to reinterpret yourself. Sort of like the way being drunk cleanses you of all your inhibitions: Maybe you dance “15,000 times better in costume than out,” as one of my friends puts it, or maybe you finally have an excuse to talk to that cute stranger dressed as a box of wine. To wear a costume is to take on a sort of power.

But the difference with my alien getup was that it wasn’t Halloween. It was an ordinary March day. As a newcomer to Portland, Oregon, I had decided to take on the role of the ultimate foreign visitor for a travel story that I was writing – a sort of cross between performance art and social experiment where I would spend 48 hours seeing the city’s sights through black, ovoid eyes. There was a tenuous journalistic angle, in that Oregon had the highest per capita rate of UFO sightings in 2014, and Portland was a hotspot. But it was personal, too: Moving from a town of 1,500 to a city of 600,000, I felt invisible. I yearned, with tinges of existential dread, to set myself apart from the faceless masses. To be a special snowflake. A special alien snowflake. Continue reading The masks we wear